Kobo Customer Support is Still Abysmal

Kobo has the worst customer support out of any any company actively developing e-reader hardware and selling digital books. Their call centre is based in India and they have no device experience and simply read from scripts. Many of the tier one support representatives have never handled a Kobo product. There are thousands of damning reviews about calling in for a simple task and are getting hanged up on or never contracted again.

The Kobo customer service experience used to be worse. In 2011 the company responded to thousands of angry patrons and said they revised their system, but negated to actually mention what they changed. At the time Mark Stevens, the Kobo VP of Customer Care issued the following statement. “In order to keep pace with our rapid growth and to provide a more global support model across many products, countries and languages, we recently made a number of changes to our customer support infrastructure. We expect that these changes, when complete will allow us to serve more readers, with a higher quality of service around the world.”

In 2014 Kobo has developed a platform called Virtual Que. This allows people to fill out an online form, such as what device they have, where they purchased it from, nature of the problem and their Kobo account. They can talk to a live agent or instead of waiting on hold, or get a call back. The problem with this platform is that most of the representatives are the same ones from the call center and do not have any practical e-reader or e-book experience.

Over the course of 2017 thousands upon thousands of Kobo customers have taken to Twitter, Facebook and blogs to talk about their issues with Kobo customer service. Here is a modest selection of their issues and how they were resolved.

“I purchased a book on Sunday, found out that the price on Amazon was astronomically cheaper and submitted a price match request. On Monday they told me that they had no record of my purchase. I went on live chat with the only helpful representative during the whole four-day ordeal (and it’s still not over). After disconnecting with him, I got an email explaining the confusion and saying that they had found the record after all and were sending a ticket to get the refund processed. The next day I got an email from the escalation people asking for the same information that I had submitted on the original price match request. I provided it right away. Nothing since, not a single reply to my repeated queries.”

“The customer service isn’t helpful in fact the one I talked to doesn’t or even handled a Kobo in her life they read notes and favorite thing is how to do a hard reset on your Kobo arc 10 when you have to hold the volume button up and hold the slider to the right and than rapidly push back and forth the slider stupid would be easy to have a pin hole in side to do it correct. Logging in after reset won’t it is linked so their third party companies getting your information Google states they no longer support Kobo due to untrusted site. so don’t bother with trying to long in with setup Google is used only for playstore. Techs to email 24_48 hours business days why call instead to assure problem is fixed. Anyway got it running on my own after doing a couple unusual things to be able to use Kobo .almost became a paper weight never buy another one to focused in selling their books.”

“I found that customer service just kept repeating the same mantra…. over and over , and did not try to resolve the issue, just kept saying sorry. I also found that the VIP Membership that I was AUTOMATICALLY signed up for that I DID NOT WANT , is NON-Refundable!! So as a customer , you do not even get an opportunity to change your mind, even if it is within minutes of realizing that the membership was AUTOMATICALLY added to your shopping cart! VERY DISAPPOINTED! The membership is USELESS!”

“I have been admiring the Kobo Aura One for the last couple of months and was thinking about getting one. I have a couple of hundred Kindle books at this point, though, so wasn’t sure about making the change. I thought I’d try out the Kobo app to see how it compared, and once I downloaded the app, I started getting promotional deals each day. I decided to purchase 2 books and thought that each was covered by a different promotional deal. After my purchase was processed, however, it was clear that the deal that promised $5 would be automatically deducted from my first purchase had not actually been automatically deducted.

I have now spent close to 2 weeks trying to sort out this matter because each time I make contact with them it’s a 24 to 48 hour wait to see how they decide to respond. I can’t believe that an online company has customer service agents who seem to have absolutely no power whatsoever to try to make things right for the customer. Every step of the way it’s about things being bumped to a different department instead of someone just fixing the problem. There does not seem to be any running account of the communications I’ve had with them and nobody seems to be able to just make things right. I can’t believe how lucky I feel that I decided to try them out instead of just jumping in over a device that I was swooning over. The latest Kindle might not be nearly as sexy as the Kobo, but I’ll take a slightly inferior device over this abysmal service any day.”

“After 2.5 hours on the phone with customer service, I had absolutely no resolution to my problem. I need to sync my kobo ereader email address with my kobo account. The agent was not able to help me resolve this problem. I also am not able to export my ebook to my hard drive. An error message continually appears. The agent was not able to remove the book from my account and reimburse me. After 2.5 hours she stated that perhaps tomorrow would be different. I’m not sure what that was supposed to mean, but now is ‘tomorrow’ and my problems persist.”

Do you have a Kobo customer service horror story? Drop a comment below and let me know.

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

i have only had to deal with Kobo customer service once in regards to an ebook order and their point system. The customer service representative was very helpful, said she would look into the problem and call me back and did call me back within 15 minutes with an answer and resolution. She was polite and seemed very willing to help. For every “bad” experience there are probably many good ones. But it is only the bad ones that get talked about. I have had some bad Amazon and Barnes and Noble customer service experiences and good ones. It always seems like Kobo is the one that gets targeted for these stories.

I think the big problem is that the average rep does not have the power to grant refunds on purchases and does not have any knowledge in the product. Take Amazon for example, in the US. They mainly hire people within the US who work from home, mothers with babies, students, or people who want to work a second job casually from home. They have a ton of power to take care of most customer concerns.

Barth Siemens

A few years ago, I pre-ordered a book from Kobo. On release date, I eagerly sync’d my Kobo. No new book! Over the next number of days, I repeatedly contacted Kobo support to be told:

On day 4, my book magically showed up with no further response from “Kobo Customer Care”, which is what they called themselves at the time.

I still buy from Kobo because I’ve had similar frustrations dealing with Audible after Amazon bought them. However, I didn’t even bother to contact support after a recent firmware update broke my Kobo. I just found workarounds.

I am dismayed to see the notice on the Kobo Help landing page, “Please be advised that due to higher than normal volume, it may take longer than 48 hours for your inquiry to be answered.” How is that Help?

William Woolrich

Sadly, I’m forced to agree. Random hangups while you’re on hold (happened at least three times after being in que for a good 20 minutes); response emails that don’t make sense; and ultimately, an inability to address the problems. My book would not successfully download on the Android app. The first agent I got ran through all the steps that made sense. Couldn’t figure it out and escalated and said they’d get back to me in 48 hours. Fine. Then I get an e-mail saying I need to get back to them within 240 (yes, 240) hours or they’ll presume the problem has been solved. Why? They said they needed to get back to ME. So I call them back and this guy’s got no idea what’s going on and can’t explain the email. He runs through a few things that we’ve already done and says he’ll escalate. In the end, they were not able to figure out the problem and offered me a refund, or if I want to keep the book a 5 credit toward my next book. Not horrible, but not a fix either. All that took about a week.

Albert

Maybe they are turning a leaf, I cannot say. My experience in the last two weeks was quite different. I used their 1-800 number, spoke with people who had a distinct North American accent, and who were definitely off-script with my issue. This was the polar opposite of my experience with PayPal support during the same period. I drove the poor guy crazy as I forced him to give me a straight answer, outside his list of rote answers he kept pasting in our chat (one of which he fed me 3 times).

moonshot

I tried to price match as Amazon were selling a book I bought from Kobo at a much lower price. A few days later the Amazon price went back up and it was at that point Kobo did the match and not when I sent the price match form in. They refused to price match.

I would rather buy from Kobo because the book sync’s to my Android phone at the point I stopped reading on the Kobo. But due to price I purchase more books from Google.

Bri

Im not sure if the call centre is in india, they have a call centre that operates from scarborough, ontario

Have you tried Amazon tech support, lately? Here’s an example: I had an Amazon-sponsored phone — one where an Amazon ad appears on startup — & I wanted to pay them money to not have that anymore. Simple … right? Nope. One hour, thirty minutes; 3 tech support reps; not a clue what I was talking about. The last one even brought Motorola support online to guide me in hacking the phone to stop the ads (didn’t work but loved the concept that Amazon was helping me to hack my phone to keep me from having to pay them). Finally I gave up and did an internet search. Found the solution in 2 minutes.

Add in horror stories from a malfunctioning Voyage — took them 3 weeks to “research” the problem. They called me back just AFTER the 1 year warranty. Would they honor it? Nope. Add in their (almost) comical, Keystone Cops attempts to fix a problem with Kindle for Windows Phone (didn’t work) and their complete non-help with fixing ebooks “stuck” in indexing. Sprinkle in a frightful encounter where they claimed I didn’t have an account with them … turns out, I use the first letter of my first name and I was giving them my full first name … last name was correct, email was correct, address was correct … I finally gave up THEN I realized what they had done.

I’ve had NO problems with either my Kobo H201 or my Aura One so I haven’t tried Kobo support BUT it would be pretty damned difficult for Kobo to out inept Amazon.

TIP: IF you get a foreign Amazon tech support person outside the US, hang up and try again. It won’t solve all the support problems, but it will help.

thetruthisoutthere

I’m based in the UK, have had terrible issues with Amazon, and their customer service appears to be based either in the Philippines or somewhere else in the Far East. I’ve had books wiped off my Kindle, reviews wiped off my books (never complain about that or they’ll wipe the rest – I’m one of their long suffering authors) and I have no more trust in them as a company. They have no concept of how to help customers and authors and no interest in it, it seems. I suspect things are much better for readers/authors in the States in regards to Amazon, but it’s dismal for the rest of us. I’m hoping I can get better service from Kobo and that some entrepreneur in UK can take up the helm some day.